James Joyce - The Search for Meaning in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


(C) William Cook

The narrative style, of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, involves the reader in the search for meaning. While there may seem to be no definable authorial presence on the surface, the narrator is a creation of the author’s and speaks the language of modernism. Our understanding of Stephen’s character is more explicit and yet more complicated, because of the style of narration, which uses a vivid stream-of-consciousness dialogue. The apparent lack of “narrative cues” is what distinguishes Joyce’s novel as different, to the standard format and narration style of conventional fiction, and characteristically difficult, a common trait of modernist literature. 
The difficulty of such a novel is that we (the reader & critic) have to read meaning by our own comprehension of the interior (and exterior) world of Stephen, with our own intellectual perceptions, beliefs, preconceptions, and experience. The problem with this is explicitly emphasized by Wayne Booth in his essay on The Problem of Distance between author, character, and reader in Portrait:

Whatever intelligence Joyce postulates in his reader – let us assume the unlikely case of its being comparable to his own – will not be sufficient for precise inference of a pattern of judgements which is, after all, private to Joyce . . . many of the refinements he intended in his finished Portrait are, for most of us, permanently lost.[i]

(C) William Cook

The language and words Joyce uses are not foreign to most literate English readers, yet the style and the complexity of the meaning of the prose, is what makes it difficult. Moreover, because we are effectively in the mind of the narrator, we also presume that meaning will come from within the language of his speech and thought. This sense of anticipation preludes the reader’s understanding of what the meaning signifies to and within Stephen’s world. In other words, we expect to find meaning through the narrator, yet until we find our way through the labyrinth of allusion and metaphor that is Stephen’s narration, we can not begin to comprehend the state of Stephen’s consciousness. 
Making reading difficult, as it does, Portrait lends itself to many forms of criticism. Its difficulty has extended its critique beyond the realms of modernism into contemporary post-modern analysis and debate. The structural coherence of the narrative depends on the type of reading practiced. For instance, a psychoanalytical (or Freudian) reading would envisage Portrait as a densely coherent structural novel, due to the narrator’s ‘stream-of-consciousness dialogue and psychological elements that dominate the text. Whereas a feminist critique, would assume it was incoherent or misogynist due to the negative or apparently disempowered portrayals of women in the novel. This reading is difficult because it is hard to prove whether Stephen is a factually autobiographical portrait of Joyce.
 The ‘problem of distance’ makes it hard for critics to determine the author’s involvement/responsibility in his character’s beliefs and actions. It is also hard to determine whether his depictions of women are stereotypically patriarchal, and therefore negatively depicted according to general feminist critique, in character  (are beautiful girls that are transformed into birds, being oppressed by the male visionary oppressor?).
By writing a complex and evocative work that seems to defy definition, Joyce effectively works the text so that the reader seeks meaning, and distances himself from criticism that lacks definitive judgements due to the difficulty of the text. While this elusiveness works well for Joyce, and promotes criticism and ‘art for art’s sake’, it also generates a negative reaction to the difficulty of Portrait.  This negative (pessimistic may be a better term) interpretation is essentially a reaction to the exclusiveness of modernism and its practitioners, Joyce being the head of the house.
What most readers (and critics) of fiction enjoy is a work capable of appreciation and intellectual stimulation, for having a story with a coherent message, meaning, or ‘portrait’. What Portrait proposes, is a scholarly interpretation requiring more than mere involvement and more like devotion, in order to salvage meaning from the depths of Stephen’s mind and the text. There is a danger of the work being too abstract and mutually exclusive, almost a work of inoperative fiction, or mere curiosity, to the general reader.
While this may seem a presumptuous view of A Portrait (depending on the reader response), it must be remembered that because of the demands it places on the reader, we are forced to make these critical assumptions regarding authorial intent, in order to understand the text more completely. In my view, this is the intention behind Joyce’s style and the reason why his work is so amenable to different critique and debate, yet considered difficult and obscure by the average reader.

(C) William Cook

Like anything that challenges the intellectual faculties, Portrait provokes an element of frustration and satisfaction with its many levels of difficulty. The apparent simplicity of the first chapter drags us into Stephen’s labyrinth of memory and experience. The increasingly complex narration and imagery disorientate the reader; just as Stephen seems to have a deep ambivalence toward all things, so too do we (those of us still reading). Whether it is ambivalence toward Stephen, Joyce, or that which is related (the content of the narration), a certain amount of mistrust and caution guides us through the dichotomous corridors of narrative.  As ambiguous as it may seem, because of its perceived difficulties and lack of authorial direction, there is still a story within the structure that seeks the eye (and ear) of the astute reader.
There is a strong relationship between the aesthetic and the character. The novel is after all a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and as such, he displays characteristics of the aggressive ideology of youth and artistic temperament. Stephen Dedalus’s life advances from childhood to adulthood, in a continual odyssey for meaning and vocation that differs from convention, tradition, and expectation of his peers and guardians. We see the world through Stephen’s perceptions, rebelling against reality and looking for a deeper truth that seems to prove as elusive for him as it does for the reader. A sense of isolation and subjective relativism envelops his character and his sense of pilgrimage. He searches for camaraderie in other like minds, envisioning other young artists on the same spiritual/artistic journey, he hears their voices calling him “making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth” (p.253).
He sees himself as “their kinsman”, the embodiment of all artists, yet with an egotistical difference that still sets him apart from all the others. Stephen’s project is the height of allusion: he wants to create what he feels has never been created. With an abundance of self-generated inspiration and confidence he states, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (p.253).     
It is not a self-less personal identity that is to be created from Stephen’s experience, but the “uncreated conscience” of his “race”, a universal paragon that will set him up as the mythological figurehead of his people. Stephen’s ‘soul’ is exposed and opened to the reader, his soul being essentially the novel itself. Stephen has been creating (epiphanies, aesthetic objects, and artistic theories) throughout the novel; his ultimate objective is to create a work of art and experience that is of a genius previously unheard of. The genius being in the creation of an aesthetic object that represents more than itself, that embodies a moral sense of responsibility, as a production of an artistic breed that has historically pursued art for its own sake. He believes that he is the artist to accomplish this unconventional task, seeing his ‘art’ as something striving toward genius.
Two main questions need to be asked of this proposal: is “the reality of experience” such that it is unique or essentially different from that which has been experienced and recorded before, enough so to create a new “uncreated conscience”?  In addition: what “race” is Stephen referring to? Is it the human race, the Irish race, the race of time and space[1], the idealized race of artistic ‘kinsmen’, or the ‘race’ of family that he now hopes to give some moral fortitude and imagination to? 
        The first question is answered with a single word: no! No individual mortal being, or subjective experience, could hope to create an entirely new moral being (conscience that has not been ‘created’ before) free from the influence of that which has come before, within themselves, let alone in a whole ’race’. The aesthetic object (or work of art) can not create and impart a wholly original sense of being, or moral sensibility, by itself, that is capable of embodying the collective “conscience”, of whatever race it is that Stephen claims as his own.  Stephen’s success depends on his understanding and involvement, in a totally anthropological (not self-justified, or assuming, about the universal nature of humankind) manner, with humanity and reality as a consequence. Leaving a reality behind that is dealt with by the imagination, rather than the heart, does not suggest that Stephen's project will be successful. Yet, it does imply that his naivete will be confronted by similar archetypes of experience that will force him to confront reality, which defines the human condition, with his heart.
The second question of ‘race’ can only be answered definitively by Joyce himself. I personally feel that Stephen’s race is that of the artist and that he is looking to blow apart artistic convention and tradition by ‘forging’ a new style that will act as a paragon to the rest of the art-world. Stephen may not do this himself, with his attempts at poetry and vision, yet Joyce does create this uniquely influential work of art and style (apparently original & incomparable in style, except maybe to Blake’s visionary works), in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
There seems an element of hope about Stephen’s intended voyage: an elation that exudes life and dreams. However, the final sentence reeks of impending doom and mythological regression (rather than looking to the future and a new “conscience”): “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead”(p.253). Stephen is looking to a role model; it is not his biological father, but the mythological “artificer” – Daedalus. Will he stand Stephen in good stead? Not if Stephen is Icarus (son of Daedalus), rebelling against his father’s requests and flying too close to the burning sun of freedom, melting his wings and drowning. Nor will he, if Stephen is the son of Daedalus’s sister, whom Daedalus killed by throwing him off Minerva’s sacred citadel.
So, why use an analogy that ends in tragedy to represent Stephen. Myth and biology are as much “nets” of the soul as is convention, tradition, and expectation. Because his character is doomed to failure from the beginning, he can not escape the past and be the great creator. His own philosophy on acquiring knowledge neutralizes his aspirations with its contradictions: “he was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world”(p.167). How can you learn wisdom from others if you are “apart” from others, and amongst all the negative things (‘snares’) that you are trying to differentiate from?          
       There remain, no firm answers to our questions. Conjecture and uncertainty, is as much a part of our reading, as it is of Stephen’s idealistic and seemingly unrealizable aspirations. He yearns for fulfillment and completion in destructive ideals that he still takes seriously. His name denotes the path he takes, it is all pre-planned, vocation and all, and not by Stephen or Daedalus, but by the “artificer” who is Joyce. The spelling of Stephen’s last name is significant; the changing from Daedalus to Dedalus distances his surname enough from the myth to imply alternative meaning. As we find out, Stephen’s journey is a bit of a ‘dead-loss’, his aspirations to an immortal (‘dead-less’) state of created conscience proving unfounded and invalid in its reliance on myth and guidance from influential guidance. Like other critics such as Caroline Gordon[ii] and Marguerite Harkness[iii], I feel that Stephen is set up to fail. The difficulty of the novel works to meet this end with much invention and intellectually challenging alternatives. My opinion is that it is Joyce’s intention to do this with Stephen’s character, so that once we have reached our conclusion we can concentrate on the text. Stephen’s character acts as a foil to the testimony of artifice and creation, of the text as a work of art, a novel of artistic dexterity, genius, and vision, and a masterpiece of words. In this respect, the difficulty of Joyce’s text does what it sets out to do.

(C) William Cook






[1] “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all”(Ecclesiastes 9:11). A biblical reminder that human events do not always turn out in the way men expect them to, which is poignant in the light of Stephen’s impending flight from the isle, paralleled with Icarus who burnt his wings and drowned in the seas of his unnatural aspirations (mortals cannot aspire to the height of the God’s).




[i] See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Text, Criticism, & Notes, ed. by Chester G. Anderson, The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of The Artist, by Wayne Booth (New York: The Viking Press, 1968) pp. 466-467.




[ii] See Joyce’s Portrait, Criticisms & Critiques, ed. by Thomas E. Connolly, Some Readings and Misreadings, by Caroline Gordon (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962) p. 144.




[iii] See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Voices of the Text, by Marguerite Harkness (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.) p.110.

New Review up for Moment of Freedom - by William Cook

News, views and reviews.

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been extremely busy with my other projects and have been neglecting poor old poetry a bit! You can see what I've been up to at my main website http://williamcookwriter.com.
I will be migrating this site to the main one above shortly but will leave a forwarding address so to speak. I recently received the best critique of my poetry that I have ever received. Please check it out below and make sure to visit Anthony Servante's excellent site about Literary Darkness - always something interesting and well-written to consider there. Enjoy!
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William Cook joins the Modernism School of Poetry. From Wiki: “For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world.” Thus William combines a writing style of prose and poetry to weave an intellectual tapestry, slipping his words in and out of subjective and objective observations, pulling and pushing the reader to envision the completed tapestry while savoring the in’s and out’s of the words themselves, much as we watch a movie without thinking about the camera work or actor interpretations of the screenplay. As Peter Gabriel points out in The Cinema Show regarding the use of cosmetics: “Concealing to reveal.”

Let’s consider the “The edge of the night” from MOMENT OF FREEDOM: Selected Poetry. First off, two notes: the title Moment of Freedom is ironic in that the title indirectly states, a lifetime of slavery to the “moment of freedom”, much as the term “a cloudless clim” from Lord Byron, must incorporate “cloud” to denote an empty sky: an image to convey emptiness rather than simply using the unpoetic “empty” to state such. Second, the poem’s title capitalizes the article but not the noun or prepositional phrase, combining poetic license with standard grammatical rule (namely “The”, the first word in the line, must be capitalized). The intellectualizing has begun; William flaunts the world’s rules by obeying them as he pleases, this, a moment of freedom.

To the work:

The edge of the night

I

A table spread in a tomb, dinner for the dead

the dead! Why did you pay a visit to my eyes last night?

Night is the time for angels of dreams

we who, each of us, will one day return

to our hungry mother the grave. The darkness comes

from knowing nothing is ours, except death

takes bites out of my heart. O Asclepius pupil

teacher Chiron, please bring medicine

to my dead love, and I forever understudy

will attempt some sort of attainment

to wake with a sore splitting back from the cold floor

in borrowed clothes and eyes, lent by a saint

giving at the same time an encompassing embrace

‘Friend,’ is all he said in tears, heart big enough to feed

this dead world. To wake up and see the sun

if not the glare from beyond, glittering

on broken glass, beside stretched roadside

where some had sprayed symbolic worlds and signs

scars full of flowers – to wake is to see

again this unusual world, whose secret cannot be known

until we enter the sky, or the earth

takes the edge off the night, the memory of your smile

II

Judging this town of sleep, I found it had already been judged

the Lord on his axe-cut cross of cypress

he is an incurable domestic bore

a family man, who never swore a word

an only child with a hollow mother

full with the carved cares of a household

wearing his poverty as a coat of arms

for eyes to look upon that beheld no bravura of vision.

The crisp grass rattles and shakes ripely, dryly

and all of this in fidelity to death

it was the same old same old, the hard husk of the ego

won’t ever resolve, yet grinds down hard internally

into the swirl, the wine bitter-soaked seed

labouring lie -- vice is kindled, burned in loins that melt

peculiar smiles alive, of all hope

has gone to explore the forlorn desert all alone

far away from the security of grim towns

where a girl is safe searching numbly in the comfort of fear.

You have gone or strayed away, never to be found

I sit and hear sour hiss of traffic calling

this burned and gutted ghost, vague semblance of time

on and off like one long sick light-switch

electric dream/confused state of everyone

greedy for dead love, drain her life, her soul

from every side for me. Greatest dribbling cannibal

tired Bolshie future, sleep . . . with disease.

III

Torn in two, I stand between, the idol and the grave

I do not know anything, I do not know. I do not

of this world, know anything – nor do I want to

but I have misled the past and will do so again

bring the teachers to the fore, let them stand

and be accounted as emperors of their own disease

and demise. As the sky claps the earth -- wrings blood

from all rocks and far away I fly, every day

from the storm in the brain. The science of the mind

corroded the body, blinded every mile I ever burnt

in this life and the next if there ever were such a thing.


To discuss William’s deliberate misuse of grammar would be folly as it is part of the pursuit to reach the reader. Note also his use of metaphor and litotes. To say simply: “a corpse” is not in his vocabulary; he metaphorically says “dinner” and the diner, death (“the dead!”). Knowledge is life, and life is accepting death: “The darkness comes from knowing nothing is ours, except death….” The first slip into litotes comes from a shift into prose from the metaphor: “…to wake with a sore splitting back from the cold floor in borrowed clothes and eyes…” and with the “borrowed…eyes” shifts back to poetry and metaphor. These are very aesthetic acrobatics. 
Furthermore, in the line “To wake up and see the sun if not the glare from beyond” we see additional shifts with the sun at once literal and figurative (as that solar body we find upon waking and as a metaphor for the afterlife). William maintains the balance between shifts throughout the work and ultimately “time” becomes a “cannibal” eating us as we sleep and wake, with varying degrees of metaphoric intents. Thus, the final line of Part II captures this fatality of cannibalism of the self as William becomes the “I” of the poem and states the thesis with the “if”, bringing together the personal and the intellectual in Part III: “The science of the mind corroded the body, blinded every mile I ever burnt in this life and the next if there ever were such a thing.”

A work in three parts, “The edge of the night” is representative of the poetry throughout MOMENT OF FREEDOM. Think of the book as a complete poem with each individual poem making up the whole. I do not recommend jumping around reading individual works, but rather beginning to end, as one would read James Joyce’s Ulysses or William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. It is a work worthy to be mentioned with these modernist authors.


William Cook
William Cook is a writer of the macabre from New Zealand, a small antipodean island group in the South Pacific. When not writing, he looks after two small daughters and designs book covers that are designed to scare the hell out of people. 
He can be reached at:
Reposted from: http://servanteofdarkness.blogspot.com/ 

More info here: http://www.williamcookwriter.com/p/poetry.html

Latest Review for Blood Related

William Cook ‘Blood Related’ Review

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Written by: Drake Morgan

William Cook’s Blood Related delves into the mind and dark psychology of a serial killer named Caleb Cunningham. The story centers around Cunningham and his family who have all been connected to a series of brutal murders over a number of years. The story begins with a psychiatric overview and then progresses to Caleb’s version of events.

The format of the narrative is interesting in that it makes not two shifts, but several. The first chapter is a first-person perspective from a court appointed psychiatrist. Through her, we get a very rough overview of the Cunninghams. We learn that there are twin brothers, both deeply psychotic and sinister. The psychiatrist examines Charlie during the course of a trial, but then becomes heavily involved with Caleb. We learn that Caleb is the true monster and the bulk of the narrative then becomes Caleb’s diaries, journals, and psychiatric sessions. Later chapters shift again to a series of newspaper articles giving the reader a final summary of the events that Caleb’s first-person account misses. The novel closes with a series of letters from Caleb explaining his motives and leaving the reader and his doctor with a cryptic goodbye.

Caleb’s story is fairly straightforward. Abused as a child, he’s described as “evil,” “one of the most dangerous men alive,” and the like. Cook’s writing is fluid and descriptive, but Caleb’s exploits take on mythological proportions as the story progresses. Cook goes to great length in his research of abnormal psychology. He skillfully uses the terminology and psychiatric evaluations to create an authentic element to the narrative. Caleb’s excesses are in stark contrast to the realism in other areas and it’s a jarring juxtaposition at times.

As a study in dark psychology, Blood Related is an interesting tale. Cook does an excellent job grappling with the disturbed mind. Psychiatry struggles with the abnormal that goes beyond the human comprehension of evil. Cook takes on the challenge of this struggle and handles it well. A more subtle handling of Caleb’s story would have added a great deal to the psychological framework. Definitely worth a read for the insight into a twisted mind.
Grab it here!

Rating: 3.5/5

SOURCE: 

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